{"product_id":"be-not-afraid-of-my-body-a-lyrical-memoir-9781953368904","title":"Be Not Afraid of My Body: A Lyrical Memoir","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eFrom an exhilarating new voice, a breathtaking memoir about gay desire, Blackness, and growing up.\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cp\u003eDarius Stewart spent his childhood in the Lonsdale projects of Knoxville, where he grew up navigating school, friendship, and his own family life in a context that often felt perilous. As we learn about his life in Tennessee--and eventually in Texas and Iowa, where he studies to become a poet--he details the obstacles to his most crucial desires: hiding his earliest attraction to boys in his neighborhood, predatory stalkers, doomed affairs, his struggles with alcohol addiction, and his eventual diagnosis with HIV. Through a mix of straightforward memoir, brilliantly surreal reveries, and moments of startling imagery and insight, Stewart's explorations of love, illness, chemical dependency, desire, family, joy, shame, loneliness, and beauty coalesce into a wrenching, musical whole.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cp\u003eA lyrical narrative reminiscent of Saeed Jones's How We Fight for Our Lives and Kiese Laymon's Heavy, Be Not Afraid of My Body stands as a compelling testament to growing up Black and gay in America, and to the drive in all of us to collect the fragments of our own experience and transform them into a story that does justice to all the multitudes we contain.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cbr\u003e","brand":"Belt Publishing","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":50619930935570,"sku":"9781953368904","price":14.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0831\/4771\/8930\/files\/img_3fcca914-3ea8-460e-b12d-f46b3a830e2f.jpg?v=1732557585","url":"https:\/\/surprise-castle.myshopify.com\/products\/be-not-afraid-of-my-body-a-lyrical-memoir-9781953368904","provider":"Surprise Castle","version":"1.0","type":"link"}